[sdsubie]

We used Airflow heating and cooling to replace our furnace. Their price was competitive and the quality of the work was top notch. Highly recommended.

[sdsubie]

Jazzman,

Just caught up with this thread. The family and I just spent 3 weeks driving through France while attending a friends wedding. I have to say that area you purchased in is some of the most beautiful village and country life I’ve seen. I’ve lived abroad, and travelled most of the world, but the combination of food (oh the PASTRY!), scenery, and people in this part of France is hard to beat. Congrats to you.

subie

[sdsubie]

CAR,

Thanks for the recommendation, much appreciated!

subie

[sdsubie]

Couple thoughts on SSD’s.

On the personal computing front, my opinion is getting your OS and applications on an SSD is probably the biggest upgrade you can do to your laptop/desktop in regards to performance. If you purchase an SSD big enough to house your user data and VM’s as well, all the better. In the end, time is money, I know my time is worth something. Having to wait a couple minutes for a system to boot adds up. Sitting there watching my application icon bounce half a dozen times in the dock (in OS X) before it launches, compared to not even 1 full bounce when my OS is on an SSD is a big difference. Those times add up, and my overall experience is much better with SSD’s installed on my personal systems. I also run multiple VM’s on my laptops, so having the SSD helps. If you DO have newish MacBook Pro, a popular option is to install a mid-size SSD (like 256GB), and then replace the optical drive with a larger spinning drive (this option exists for many PC laptops as well). This gives you cheap data storage plus the performance of an SSD.

[sdsubie]

I don’t think welfare will be around, so lets hope Vegas works out.

Agreed, there a ton of investors buying in Vegas right now, stuff really flies off the market quickly, a lot of cash buyers too.

The good thing about Las Vegas is even a pretty nice house, in a pretty nice area is not only cheap (compared to SD prices), but also cash flows pretty well too, so you can hedge a bit against filthy renters by not going to the cheapest area’s. “Hedge a bit” I guess is the key here, since you can find filthy renters at all income and rental brackets.

[sdsubie]

Brian, where did you end up buying?

[sdsubie]

I setup 4 of the logitech external networked cameras at our house:

http://www.logitech.com/en-us/video-security-systems

I was looking for higher resolution cameras because I wanted to be able to get a identifiable license plate when people pulled into the driveway.

I’ve been very happy with the result. The cameras a motion activated, and when they sense motion, I have them set to take a snaphot and e-mail it to me. In addition, motion also has them start recording video. Recorded video is recorded to both a micro sd card that is on the camera, and also to either a home computer, or your dropbox account ( I like the drop box account because you’d still have recorded video if someone swiped your home computer). The camera’s also have night vision.

Logitech has apps so that you can watch live video from your iphone/ipad/mobile device, as well as you can login to a logitech site and watch live video via web browser on your computer.

[sdsubie]

I 2nd Sheldon. We used him for our purchase loan and were very satisfied with the experience.

[sdsubie]

We had UVerse at our last place (can’t get it at current place) and were really impressed. We previously had Time Warner before we switched to uverse, and real world bandwidth was significantly slower than what we payed for. With uverse we were often getting faster speeds that our payed mbps speed..

[sdsubie]

I 2nd Summerlin. Summerlin has the best feel of a community in Vegas IMHO. Lots of the communities in this area also have mature trees and greener streets, which I like (though I know it’s not as water friendly). I also think the Summerlin will be the best positioned in a housing price recovery (if one ever comes to Vegas).

[sdsubie]

I see, that makes sense. We’re currently in a 4.375 (30yr fixed) from when we bought last year and current interest rates getting me thinking about refi-ing. Thanks for the info!

[sdsubie]

flu,

Did you end up going with absolutemortgage? If so, how was your experience with them compared to previous refi’s?

[sdsubie]

I would recommend B & B Appliance in Escondido. We were shopping for a double oven and a cooktop. I found B & B to be extremely knowledgable, much more specialized and informative than a best buy/fry’s experience where the same person selling appliances also sells ipods. B & B also does warranty repairs, so they had a lot of insight about specific models to steer away from due to known issues. They ended up matching the best price we found, which I believe was sale price on Best Buy’s website.

We ended up with Bosch for cooktop and double oven and have been very pleased so far.

Our friends bought all Dacor (also from B&B) and have been happy with that brand as well.

[sdsubie]

I’m not a Ron Paul hater or lover, but I did find this article amusing:

http://news.yahoo.com/colbert-super-pac-fundraises-ron-paul-173606794–abc-news-politics.html

[sdsubie]

Thanks for the info sdrealtor! A trip to the recorders office is in my future.

[Author]

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